We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have committed to supporting DebConf20 as Platinum sponsors.

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.

With these commitments as Platinum Sponsors, Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services are contributing to make possible our annual conference, and directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much for your support of DebConf20!

Participating in DebConf20 online

The 21st Debian Conference is being held Online, due to COVID-19, from August 23rd to 29th, 2020. There are 7 days of activities, running from 10:00 to 01:00 UTC. Visit the DebConf20 website at https://debconf20.debconf.org to learn about the complete schedule, watch the live streaming and join the different communication channels for participating in the conference.

Today is Debian's 27th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate the DebianDay, you can join the party or organise something yourselves :-)

Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your contributions to Debian. For example, you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release, have a look at the DebConf20 schedule and register to participate online (August 23rd to 29th, 2020), or put a Debian live image in a DVD or USB and give it to some person near you, who still didn't discover Debian.

Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we do together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 27 years, and happy birthday Debian!

We encourage our community to celebrate around the world the 27th Debian anniversary with organized DebianDay events. This year due to the COVID-19 pandemic we cannot organize in-person events, so we ask instead that contributors, developers, teams, groups, maintainers, and users promote The Debian Project and Debian activities online on August 16th (and/or 15th).

Communities can organize a full schedule of online activities throughout the day. These activities can include talks, workshops, active participation with contributions such as translations assistance or editing, debates, BoFs, and all of this in your local language using tools such as Jitsi for capturing audio and video from presenters for later streaming to YouTube.

If you are not aware of any local community organizing a full event or you don't want to join one, you can solo design your own activity using OBS and stream it to YouTube. You can watch an OBS tutorial here.

Don't forget to record your activity as it will be a nice idea to upload it to Peertube later.

Please add your event/activity on the DebianDay wiki page and let us know about and advertise it on Debian micronews. To share it, you have several options:

• Follow the steps listed here for Debian Developers.
• Contact us using IRC in channel #debian-publicity on the OFTC network, and ask us there.
• Send a mail to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org and ask for your item to be included in micronews. This is a publicly archived list.

PS: DebConf20 online is coming! It will be held from August 23rd to 29th, 2020. Registration is already open.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Richard Laager (rlaager)
• Thiago Andrade Marques (andrade)
• Vincent Prat (vivi)
• Michael Robin Crusoe (crusoe)
• Jordan Justen (jljusten)
• Anuradha Weeraman (anuradha)
• Bernelle Verster (indiebio)
• Gabriel F. T. Gomes (gabriel)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Nicolas Mora (babelouest)
• Birger Schacht (birger)
• Sudip Mukherjee (sudip)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Marco Trevisan
• Dennis Braun
• Stephane Neveu
• Seunghun Han
• Alexander Johan Georg Kjäll
• Friedrich Beckmann
• Diego M. Rodriguez
• Nilesh Patra
• Hiroshi Yokota

Congratulations!

On July 18th Stretch LTS starts, offering two more years of security support to the Debian Stretch release. Stretch LTS will be the fourth iteration of LTS, following Squeeze LTS which started in 2014, Wheezy LTS in 2016 and Jessie LTS in 2018.

However, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS.

Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online!

In two weeks (July 27th 2020) we will close the survey, so please don't hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup email with the results.

More information about Debian LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS, including generic contact information.

Click here to fill out the survey now!